1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a cartridge system which includes a cartridge and a main body apparatus having a slot into which the cartridge is inserted.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, a proposal has been made that a storage medium such as a hard disk drive (HDD) should be used in the form of a cartridge inserted in a main body apparatus such as a reproduction apparatus. There may be a variety of such cartridges having different shapes. Therefore, the main body apparatus is usually provided with different types of slots adapted for different types of cartridges (for example, Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2004-86674 and Japanese Patent No. 4253887).
However, if the main body apparatus needs to be provided with slots for different cartridge shapes, the main body apparatus must be inevitably large in size. Furthermore, if cartridge shapes are standardized later, the slots except for a slot for the standardized cartridge shape will be no longer used. To solve this problem, a single slot may be subjected to shared use among the differently shaped cartridges. However, the sharing of a single slot requires the single slot to have such a shape that a large-sized cartridge can be inserted. This still leaves a problem that it is difficult to position a small-sized cartridge in the course of insertion.
Accordingly, the object of this invention is to provide a cartridge system which facilitates the positioning of a cartridge in the course of insertion into a slot provided in a main body apparatus.